It's one of the unsolved political mysteries of 2003: Exactly who drew up the plan for Democrats to abuse the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, or SCCI, as a stealth weapon to undermine and discredit President George W. Bush and the U.S. war effort in Iraq?

The plot, authored by aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., vice chairman of the committee, has poisoned the working atmosphere of a crucial legislative panel in a time of war, Senate sources say. It centered on duping the panel's Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, into approving probes that in actuality would be fishing expeditions inside the State Department and Pentagon. The authors hoped to dig up and hype "improper or questionable conduct by administration officials." According to a staff memo, the committee then would release the information during the course of the "investigation," with Democrats providing their "additional views" that would, "among other things, castigate the majority [Republicans] for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry."

In other words, they would manufacture and denounce a cover-up where none existed. The Democrats then would drag the issue through the 2004 presidential campaign by creating an independent commission to investigate, according to the memo.

The plan, made public by Fox News on Nov. 6, went like this: "Prepare to launch an independent investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation at any time  but we can only do so once. The best time to do so will probably be [in 2004]."

Even before the memo was written, Rockefeller's staff already was off on its own, well outside the traditional bipartisan channels. According to the memo, the "FBI Niger investigation" of reports that Saddam Hussein's regime had tried to buy uranium from West Africa "was done solely at the request of the vice chairman."

The plan wrecked more than two-and-a-half decades of unique bipartisanship on the SSCI, whose job is to oversee the CIA and the rest of the nation's intelligence services. In fact the SSCI, according to the Wall Street Journal after the revelation, was "one of the last redoubts of peaceful coexistence in Congress." But that bipartisanship ended last year when Democrats demanded that the committee staff be split. Instead of reporting directly to the chairman, it now was bifurcated, with Republicans answering to the GOP chairman and Democrats working for the Democratic vice chairman. Roberts didn't like the change, warning at the time that the Democrats wanted to divide the committee into "partisan camps." But the Republicans caved, and the staff director of the Democrats, Christopher Mellon, built his own autonomous apparatus.

Insight has pieced together how the Democrats' fishing expedition worked. According to insiders, Mellon, a former Clinton administration official, is part of a network of liberal operatives within the Pentagon and CIA who reportedly are seeking to discredit and politically disable some of the nation's most important architects of the war on terrorism and their efforts to keep weapons of mass destruction from falling into terrorist hands. Mellon already was a SSCI staffer when the Clinton administration tapped him to work as a deputy to the assistant secretary of defense for C3I (command, control, communications and intelligence), where he was responsible for security and information operations. In the C3I office, where he held a civilian rank equivalent to a three-star general, Mellon worked on intelligence-policy issues, or in the words of a former colleague, Cheryl J. Roby, "things like personnel, training and recruiting for intelligence." The office is under the purview of the undersecretary of defense for policy, a post now held by conservative Douglas J. Feith.

Clinton-era personnel reforms allowed officials of his administration to burrow into vital Pentagon posts as careerists, administration officials say, where they have been maneuvering to keep Bush loyalists out of key positions and/or undermine their authority while pushing their own political agendas that run contrary to those of the president. This network, Insight has discovered, extends to the Pentagon's outer reaches such as the National Defense University and far-flung academic and influential policy think tanks, or "CINC tanks," serving the commanders of the U.S. military theaters around the world.

Senate and Department of Defense (DoD) colleagues say Mellon has a beef against Feith and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, under whom he served briefly until the new Bush administration made its full transition into office. Intelligence sources say he tried to keep conservatives out of key Pentagon posts and to undermine tough antiterrorism policies after 9-11. Back at the SSCI, Mellon's chief targets for criticism have been Feith and his like-minded State Department colleague, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who holds the nonproliferation portfolio. Both Feith and Bolton are strong supporters of President Bush's advocacy of "regime change" for rogue states and are considered to be among the most faithful advocates in the administration of his personal policy positions.

DoD civilians loyal to the president have complained for more than two years about Mellon, both while he was at the Pentagon and at his new perch in the Senate. Upon his return to the SSCI, bipartisan staff cooperation broke down almost completely.

"The parties aren't talking to one another," according to a committee source. After the memo became public, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., ordered an end to cooperation with the Democrats on the Iraq investigations.

Mellon's public record doesn't indicate any hard-core partisan leanings, showing instead a bipartisanship as a sometime floater on the liberal Republican side. Federal Election Commission records show he donated $1,000 to the George H.W. Bush re-election campaign in 1993 and $1,000 to the Republican National Committee in 1992. In his first tour on the Senate intelligence committee, he served as an appointee of the late liberal Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I., when George Tenet, a Democrat who now is director of the CIA, was committee staff director. Mellon then took the C3I post at the Pentagon when William Cohen, the liberal Republican senator from Maine, became secretary of defense for Clinton.

So what might have motivated Mellon to become involved in the memo scandal to politicize the intelligence committee against the current president? Mellon did not return Insight calls for comment.

Asked whether Mellon wrote the plan, Rockefeller's spokeswoman Wendy Morigi did not attempt to exonerate the staff director.

"The senator has not stated who the author of that memo is," Morigi said, "and I don't think he intends to." She spoke with Rockefeller and then called Insight again to say Sen. Rockefeller would not comment.

In any case Rockefeller, a strong liberal who had enjoyed a reputation of bipartisanship on committee matters, surprised colleagues when he allowed the Democrats on the committee staff to use the supersecret body as a political weapon. Sources with firsthand knowledge say that Rockefeller broke the committee's bipartisan custom of requesting information from government agencies over the signatures of the chairman, representing the majority party, and the vice chairman, representing the minority.

"Rockefeller sent out his own request for information  the first time a request to the administration for information was not signed by both the chairman and vice chairman of the committee," according to a source involved with the requests. The source says the requests were worded in ways designed to elicit specific answers of a sensitive nature. When the senior Pentagon and State Department officials answered the requests, Democrats on the intelligence committee "leaked it, though some of it was top secret," the source said without citing examples.

When the targeted officials caught on to the game, Senate Democrats led by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a scrappy SSCI member, denounced them for failure to provide Democrat senators with information about the war. They publicly acted outraged at what they alleged was a certain deception and demanded even more information, telling the press that top Bush officials were forcing the CIA and other intelligence agencies to skew intelligence analysis to fit a preconceived conclusion.

Some Democrats see through this political warfare and are troubled by it. Keeping the SSCI and its House counterpart nonpartisan, wrote former Sen. Robert Kerrey, D-Neb., in the New York Post in the midst of the memo controversy, "is vital for the nation's security because much of what is done to collect, process and disseminate intelligence needed by civilian and military leaders is done under conditions of rigorously regulated secrecy." Kerrey is a former vice chairman of the committee.

"Of all the committees, this is the one single committee that should unquestionably be above partisan politics," said an angry Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga. "The information it deals with should never, never be distorted, compromised or politicized in any shape, form or fashion. For it involves the lives of our soldiers and our citizens. Its actions should always be above reproach; its words never politicized."

Rockefeller defended his staff and the outrageous document itself, calling it a "private memo that nobody saw except me and the staff people that wrote it for me." He rebuffed calls from Frist, Miller and others that the staffers responsible be exposed, let alone fired, and instead accused Republicans of stealing the document from his aides' computers.

"Mr. Rockefeller refuses to denounce the memo, which he says was unauthorized and written by staffers. If that's the case, at the very least some heads ought to roll," declared the Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Firing Mellon as the staff director for the culprits, the Journal said, would be "a good place to start."

Miller went even further: "I have often said that the process in Washington is so politicized and polarized that it can't even be put aside when we're at war. Never has that been proved more true than the highly partisan and perhaps treasonous memo prepared for the Democrats on the intelligence committee."

The Georgia Democrat measured his words, continuing: "If what has happened here is not treason, it is its first cousin. The ones responsible  be they staff or elected or both  should be dealt with quickly and severely, sending a lesson to all that this kind of action will not be tolerated, ignored or excused."

Chairman Roberts sees a danger to the nation through such politics: "If we give in to the temptation to exploit our good offices for political gain, we cannot expect our intelligence professionals to entrust us with our nation's most sensitive information. You can be sure that foreign intelligence services will stop cooperating with our intelligence agencies the first time they see their secrets appear in our media."

Kerrey, once a shining star among Senate Democrats, wrote, "The production of a memo by an employee of a Democratic member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is an example of the destructive side of partisan politics. That it probably emerged as a consequence of an increasingly partisan environment in Washington and may have been provoked by equally destructive Republican acts is neither a comfort nor a defensible rationalization."

Senate Majority Leader Frist called for the culprits to come forward and apologize, angrily announcing he would suspend cooperation on the Iraq investigation. That wasn't enough for Sen. Miller, who demanded, "Heads should roll!"

Voters need to know who issued that memo. Who's trying to out a sitting president by using sensitive information for political gain during a time of war?I hope the Republicans have their own investigation going on concerning this. If tax money is to be used, this is a worthy cause. (It's Republicans money anyway. The Democrat base doesn't work enough to pay taxes.)

21
posted on 12/23/2003 5:52:25 AM PST
by concerned about politics
( Liberals are still stuck at the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy)

I remember these rotten blokes and their smarmy preaching about integrity and "who knew what and when" back during Watergate. This is the same crowd that used their huge majority to decimate our intelligence community and military. But they to this day have never met a communist, a terrorist, or a dictator they didn't like.

If truth be known, because of all the Dem.voter fraud in the big cities alone, Bush would most likely have won 5 or 6 more states, and won the "meaningless" popular vote by around 3,000,000 votes.

Once the liberal press called Florida for Gore, the rest of the Republicans in the nation had no need to go to the polls to vote. If Gore took Florida, it was over. Imagine the landslide for Bush had the election not been called off early by the left wing minions! The rest of the nation would have still voted.

23
posted on 12/23/2003 5:58:05 AM PST
by concerned about politics
( Liberals are still stuck at the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy)

How many of the military personal are they willing to see dead to regain their power, anyway?

---- doesn't matter to them --- ends justify their means --- the Hillary Rotten/Saul Alinsky School of Rotten Political "Ethics" has taken over the Democrat party.

It's a war on THREE levels! One against the "terrorists", one against the Democrat/Socialist/Rotten Party, and one against the destructive lamestream/socialist/one-world/Dem. - sycophant media. Don't forget the THIRD part. THEY are the most powerfully destructive in the end.

Take for instance the abomoninable recent Supreme Court decision on The First Amendment and CFR! Look how the media blew that off and failed to describe it to the public. The decision itself was horrible enough, but the lame stream media's silence and outright coloring of the decision was worse. If the people were informed of what happened, they would have been storming Washington D.C. It's not too late to do some storming!!!

But this mainstream media must be disassembled, ot this country is OVER!

24
posted on 12/23/2003 5:58:13 AM PST
by thesummerwind
(like painted kites, those days and nights, they went flyin' by)

The feelings they stir in me are unsettling. I hate to have these feelings any time, but in this season, it's much more uncomforable. But, the leadership of the Democrat Party has become pure evil, and needs to be exposed.

I go back to, as a kid, handing out "I Like Ike" buttons in '52. The Dems. were much different in the older days. It is a real war these days, since Bill Clinton and his Communist-inspired folks moved in.

There is a great talk-show host here in Pittsburgh who for many years has asked this question about the Clintons. "Who really are these people? Who are they?"

I'm afraid most of America is going to find out way too late who they are and what they have done. I fear it is already too late, just considering all Clinton gave away in the nuclear department.

26
posted on 12/23/2003 6:07:21 AM PST
by thesummerwind
(like painted kites, those days and nights, they went flyin' by)

W. Va. Senator John D. Rockefeller, Democratic Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, someone who is absolutely in a position to know the truth about the matter, when asked on Fox News Sunday June 22, 2003, whether he'd heard any evidence to suggest President Bush lied regarding Iraqi WMD intelligence reports said, "No, I have not."

When asked why John Kerry was intimating Bush had lied, Rockefeller basically said, "Kerry is running for president. His agenda is not the same as mine."

This might suggest that Jay was stupid for letting himself appear to change his views so dramatically later.

It's my impression that his response at that time on FNS was genuine, but Democrats came down hard on him quickly thereafter for being so out of sync with their leaders' plans. I think, therefore, Jay doesn't really run that show.

I wouldn't be at all surprised that it's a Mellon-via-BillyJeff/McAwful run show.

"Aids to Rockefeller" as authors doesn't sound like anything in my experience within the beltway. (All right, I admit, about the only thing I've ever run in DC is my computer.)

But I was actually talking about inner city Democrat precincts in 2000 that counted more votes for Gore than they had registered Democrat voters in those precincts! Voter fraud - the stuffing variety.

Another reason why the Dems do everything in their power to KEEP the butterfly ballots. They can use more than one voting card at a time. With more than one, it's harder to punch, causing dimples and hanging chads. Otherwise, they easily fall out with just a touch.Democrats need the butterfly ballots to survive an election.Watch the Democrats. They'll fight tooth and nail to stop any other type of voting machine from replacing the butterfly.

30
posted on 12/23/2003 6:27:16 AM PST
by concerned about politics
( Liberals are still stuck at the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy)

The plot, authored by aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., vice chairman of the committee...

Insight has pieced together how the Democrats' fishing expedition worked. According to insiders, Mellon, a former Clinton administration official, is part of a network of liberal operatives within the Pentagon and CIA who reportedly are seeking to discredit and politically disable some of the nation's most important architects of the war on terrorism...

I wouldn't be at all surprised that it's a Mellon-via-BillyJeff/McAwful run show.

&&&

I agree. For a Senator to allow his position on this most important committee to become politicized, there had to be considerable outside influence = Clinton.

Think of the 'objection' that the Judicial committee had to Miguel Estrada. The dems kept demanding Estrada's files from his work in the (Clinton) administration. It was clear to me that Bill and Hillary knew as fact that there were some Estrada written opinions that could be spun to render him 'unsuitable.'

Clinton-era personnel reforms allowed officials of his administration to burrow into vital Pentagon posts as careerists, administration officials say, where they have been maneuvering to keep Bush loyalists out of key positions and/or undermine their authority while pushing their own political agendas that run contrary to those of the president. This network, Insight has discovered, extends to the Pentagon's outer reaches such as the National Defense University and far-flung academic and influential policy think tanks, or "CINC tanks," serving the commanders of the U.S. military theaters around the world.

This is a critical point -- these leftist moles have to be identified and removed from positions of authority within the Administration.

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